For Taylor Klein, it begins with a bizarre Facebook message from a good friend. A Pornhub hyperlink. She doesn’t open it. Must be spam, she figures. “I think you’ve been hacked?” she replies. Nope. Her pal insists the hyperlink is actual. She clicks, and her nightmare begins.

Another Body, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, opens with Klein seeing that she has been deepfaked into pornography; somebody has used enhancing software program to place her face on the our bodies of porn actors and now these clips are all around the web. The movie follows Klein as she tries to determine who did this to her and what she will do to cease them. Out immediately, it’s an all-too-timely documentary. As WIRED reported earlier this week, nonconsensual deepfake porn has skyrocketed in recent times, with lots of of 1000’s of movies simply discoverable by way of Google and Microsoft’s search platforms.

This rise in deepfake porn is made doable by a brand new wave of AI enhancing instruments accessible on-line—instruments that Compton and Hamlyn incorporate into their documentary. We will not reveal how right here, however suffice it to say: Another Body does a wonderful job of underlining how deepfake know-how can distort our perceptions of one another. The level is to place a human face on one thing many try to dismiss as not “real.”

The opening scene exhibits a close-up of Klein’s eye as she watches a deepfaked model of herself on a display. It’s an intimate starting, one which speaks clearly to the movie’s aim. Another Body needs the viewer to think about themselves in Klein’s place, to viscerally really feel the disorientation and horror that comes with realizing that your picture could be manipulated to do belongings you would by no means do. To this finish, it additionally retains the angle tight on Klein within the first half hour and takes each alternative to make her really feel like an everywoman. After the intro, viewers are proven images of Klein’s girlhood. In a voiceover, she describes her love of numbers, engineering, and guidelines, as if to remind the viewers of her innate wholesomeness. (“We’re all a bunch of nerds,” she says, driving the purpose residence.)

The administrators additional anchor Klein’s perspective by filming a sequence of interviews as if the viewer is chatting privately along with her by way of FaceTime. At one level, there’s a scene wherein the cameraperson makes Klein a espresso and brings it to her in mattress, creating the feeling for viewers that they’re those handing her the mug. That half is a bit tacky, but it surely’s troublesome to stroll away from this movie with out feeling protecting of Klein, whilst she emerges because the individual most probably to guard herself.

Klein quickly discovers that she’s not the one individual in her social circle who has turn into the goal of this type of marketing campaign, and the movie turns its lens on just a few different ladies who’ve undergone eerily comparable experiences. They share assets and reluctantly do the investigative legwork wanted to get the police’s consideration.

Another Body is basically a narrative about how the justice system lags perilously behind know-how, and the way victims of deepfake porn are sometimes thrust into the dual roles of detective and advocate as they work to guard themselves and forestall others from being equally harmed. When Klein describes how troublesome it was to get police to take her state of affairs severely, the failure is manifestly obvious to viewers. “The detective was saying weird things to me like, ‘Oh, well, I need to look closely at these videos to make sure that it’s you,’” she says. “He asked, ‘What have you done to cause someone to do this to you?’”